Responsive Website Design

Anyone can design a Website can’t they?

Absolutely anyone can design a website, as the years go by it becomes easier and easier with new tools and new website communities coming along that make the design of any type of website easier and easier. Chances are you know a business or somebody that has built a website and chances are it looks pretty good.

Did you know that almost all Websites fail?

That’s right almost all business websites fail even those designed by many so call professionals, and by fail I mean simply they fail to generate a meaningful return on investment. And many of those that do generate a return fail to maximize this return. Chances are that if you have a website it isn’t working and isn’t generating the results you want and you have heard others are achieving.

Why do they fail?

The simple answer is they fail because they are designed by amateurs that do not understand how websites should be designed. Let me state that again most Websites even those by so called Website Designers are designed by people that do not understand how Websites should be designed and how they work. Gone are the days when designers were free to come up with any old design, nowadays it’s more a science with specific metrics and measurements being available for almost every section of a website.

Consider your typical design methodology, you’ll give your order to a designer and they will come back to you with various designs. You’ll look at them and say can you change this, I don’t like my logo there can you make it bigger, how about we do this here and can I have this. Your designer will often just go along with you and in the end you’ll get the design approved. And if your designer doesn’t go along with you it’s almost certainly because they haven’t quoted for something and it’ll cost you more if you want it. The website will be built and launched and hey presto it doesn’t work. What a surprise you’ve got a designer allowing an unqualified business owner to make decisions about his website and the designer only pulls him up if it’s not in the specification.

This therefore means that most websites are designed to fail from the very start and at the very least they will never achieve the results they could of if only they had been designed properly.

Isn’t this all bollocks to promote your own services?

Of course it is, in all these years no one has measured what components of a website work, no one has tested the effects of colours, the effects of different layouts, components, etc. No one has applied any scientific formula or worked out what works best in different situations and no one has ever written a book or taught this to others.

What is it that you do then?

We strive to work at the cutting edge of this industry, we work hard to understand what works and why it works and what doesn’t. There are hundreds of things we understand and do automatically, far too many to list here… but let’s look at just one first and then mention a few other things that we do differently.

Visual Hierarchy

This is one of the most important principles behind effective web design, it’s the order in which the human eye perceives what it sees.

Look at the circles above and rank them in order of importance. Without knowing anything else you have been able to easily rank these circles and that is visual hierarchy. When designing your website you want people to click certain areas much more than other areas by understand visual hierarchy you can achieve this.

We use this when designing a website by ranking the elements of the website against the business objectives and then positioning them using visual hierarchy. This means that those elements we rank the most important are seen first and those less important last. Visual hierarchy is one of those web design elements that can make a website go from just aesthetically pleasing, to functional and useful and from giving just mediocre returns on investment to outstanding returns on investment.

We understand lots of other things

That is just one of the things we understand as I mentioned previously I have been doing this sort of stuff for around twenty years now and in this time I’ve been studying what works for my own customers and learning from others what works for their customers. My own skills and the skills of my team are constantly being updated and improved and I can guarantee that this unique knowledge of ours benefits every single one of our customers.

Our customers generate much better results online than they would ordinarily generate.

Need more proof?

Let me share with you one more thing then, consider a modest eCommerce website that is the shopfront of the business, the website owners depend upon sales from the website to run their business. The website they have looks awesome as it was designed by a large marketing agency and it does make sales, however a large proportion of potential customers add items to the shopping basket and then after registering with the website they change their mind before entering their credit card details … so the sales is lost.

In most cases this would be true, but not for our clients. We can implemented a system that would automatically email these potential customers, it would remind them of their shopping cart and the benefits associated with buying from you, it could include a coupon code, etc… the aim being that these lost orders are from people interested in what you have to sell, so by simply nudging them we can gain additional orders, orders that most other companies fail to capitalise on.

But my product or service is complex and I cannot sell it online.

You can sell anything online, whatever you can think of can be sold online, and the secret is to understand how. Let’s assume you sell some complex and expensive, it could be anything, chances are no one is going to click and add to shopping cart button and buy it straight off. However they can be sold on entering their email address and gaining more information, a special offer, a white paper, anything … if you sell them on entering their email address you then build a relationship with that person, so that person can learn all about you and when the time is right that person will come to you and buy from you. This works with almost anything, the secret is simply to break down the sales process to its simplest form and work out exactly what it is you are selling to meet the long term objectives of the business owner.

Not every business is our ideal customer

Understanding that we generate substantially better results for our customers than most developers we also understand that not every company that approaches us is our ideal customer. Your budget might not work, your methodology of doing business might not mesh with ours, and your expectations might not be realistic and might not meet your budget restraints.

You might not like the fact that we believe that clients are rarely qualified to make decisions about their website and you might not like the fact that we will make those decisions for you. Just so that we can design something that has a chance of meeting your goals and surpassing them in many instances.

You will love the results we generate for you, the security and speed we build into every website and the way we do things … but first you have to capture our attention and that means contacting us, once you have we’ll send you a link to a rather long form that has been design to gather the information we require, once we have this we will evaluate your response and work out if we are a good match for each other. As we work on a long term basis with our clients, we like to work with people we like and who ethics we share… in other words, show us your a chamber of commerce member or involved in business networking and we’ll move mountains to help you succeed.

Awards

Over the years we’ve won all manner of awards, website design awards, small business awards and business champion awards both here in Western Australia and within Australia as a whole, however the one award I am most proud of was received from The International Business Council of Western Australia and was given to me “In Recognition of an Outstanding Contribution to Business Benefiting Western Australia”…